OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Redefining part-of-speech classes with distributional semantic models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper studies how word embeddings trained on the British National Corpus interact with part of speech boundaries. Our work targets the Universal PoS tag set, which is currently actively being used for annotation of a range of languages. We experiment with training classifiers for predicting PoS tags for words based on their embeddings. The results show that the information about PoS affiliation contained in the distributional vectors allows us to discover groups of words with distributional patterns that differ from other words of the same part of speech. This data often reveals hidden inconsistencies of the annotation process or guidelines. At the same time, it supports the notion of `soft' or `graded' part of speech affiliations. Finally, we show that information about PoS is distributed among dozens of vector components, not limited to only one or two features.
Perceptual Reward Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Reinforcement learning problems are often described through rewards that indicate if an agent has completed some task. This specification can yield desirable behavior, however many problems are difficult to specify in this manner, as one often needs to know the proper configuration for the agent. When humans are learning to solve tasks, we often learn from visual instructions composed of images or videos. Such representations motivate our development of Perceptual Reward Functions, which provide a mechanism for creating visual task descriptions. We show that this approach allows an agent to learn from rewards that are based on raw pixels rather than internal parameters.
Determining Health Utilities through Data Mining of Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

'Health utilities' measure patient preferences for perfect health compared to specific unhealthy states, such as asthma, a fractured hip, or colon cancer. When integrated over time, these estimations are called quality adjusted life years (QALYs). Until now, characterizing health utilities (HUs) required detailed patient interviews or written surveys. While reliable and specific, this data remained costly due to efforts to locate, enlist and coordinate participants. Thus the scope, context and temporality of diseases examined has remained limited. Now that more than a billion people use social media, we propose a novel strategy: use natural language processing to analyze public online conversations for signals of the severity of medical conditions and correlate these to known HUs using machine learning. In this work, we filter a dataset that originally contained 2 billion tweets for relevant content on 60 diseases. Using this data, our algorithm successfully distinguished mild from severe diseases, which had previously been categorized only by traditional techniques. This represents progress towards two related applications: first, predicting HUs where such information is nonexistent; and second, (where rich HU data already exists) estimating temporal or geographic patterns of disease severity through data mining.
Brun expansions of stepped surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2016
Year: 2016

Dual maps have been introduced as a generalization to higher dimensions of word substitutions and free group morphisms. In this paper, we study the action of these dual maps on particular discrete planes and surfaces -- namely stepped planes and stepped surfaces. We show that dual maps can be seen as discretizations of toral automorphisms. We then provide a connection between stepped planes and the Brun multi-dimensional continued fraction algorithm, based on a desubstitution process defined on local geometric configurations of stepped planes. By extending this connection to stepped surfaces, we obtain an effective characterization of stepped planes (more exactly, stepped quasi-planes) among stepped surfaces.
Efficient Multicasting in Content-Centric Networks Using Datagrams
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

The Named Data Networking (NDN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) architectures are the leading approaches for content-centric networking, and both require using Interests (requests that elicit content) and maintaining per-Interest forwarding state in Pending Interest Tables (PIT) to store per-Interest forwarding state. To date, PITs have been assumed to be necessary to enable native support for multicasting in the data plane, such that multicast forwarding trees (MFT) are established by the forwarding and aggregation of Interests using PITs. We present a new approach to content-centric networks based on anonymous datagrams that provides native support for multicasting, but does so without the need to maintain per-Interest forwarding state. Simulation experiments are used to show that the proposed new approach attains the same end-to-end delays for multicasting while requiring orders of magnitude fewer forwarding entries.
Self-Aware and Self-Adaptive Autoscaling for Cloud Based Services
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

Modern Internet services are increasingly leveraging on cloud computing for flexible, elastic and on-demand provision. Typically, Quality of Service (QoS) of cloud-based services can be tuned using different underlying cloud configurations and resources, e.g., number of threads, CPU and memory etc., which are shared, leased and priced as utilities. This benefit is fundamentally grounded by autoscaling: an automatic and elastic process that adapts cloud configurations on-demand according to time-varying workloads. This thesis proposes a holistic cloud autoscaling framework to effectively and seamlessly address existing challenges related to different logical aspects of autoscaling, including architecting autoscaling system, modelling the QoS of cloud-based service, determining the granularity of control and deciding trade-off autoscaling decisions. The framework takes advantages of the principles of self-awareness and the related algorithms to adaptively handle the dynamics, uncertainties, QoS interference and trade-offs on objectives that are exhibited in the cloud. The major benefit is that, by leveraging the framework, cloud autoscaling can be effectively achieved without heavy human analysis and design time knowledge. Through conducting various experiments using RUBiS benchmark and realistic workload on real cloud setting, this thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the framework based on various quality indicators and compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.
About Pyramid Structure in Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) brought revolution without any doubt to various challenging tasks, mainly in computer vision. However, their model designing still requires attention to reduce number of learnable parameters, with no meaningful reduction in performance. In this paper we investigate to what extend CNN may take advantage of pyramid structure typical of biological neurons. A generalized statement over convolutional layers from input till fully connected layer is introduced that helps further in understanding and designing a successful deep network. It reduces ambiguity, number of parameters, and their size on disk without degrading overall accuracy. Performance are shown on state-of-the-art models for MNIST, Cifar-10, Cifar-100, and ImageNet-12 datasets. Despite more than 80% reduction in parameters for Caffe_LENET, challenging results are obtained. Further, despite 10-20% reduction in training data along with 10-40% reduction in parameters for AlexNet model and its variations, competitive results are achieved when compared to similar well-engineered deeper architectures.
A Low Complexity Spectrum Sensing Scheme for Estimating Frequency Band Edges in Multi-Standard Military Communication Receivers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In a typical multi-standard military communication receiver, fast and reliable spectrum sensing unit is required to extract the information of multiple channels (frequency bands) present in a wideband input signal. In this paper, an energy detector based on our reconfigurable filter bank, in [5], for detecting the edge frequencies of the channels is proposed. Simulation results are presented to show the trade-off between the time required to calculate edge frequencies of all the channels and the maximum normalized error in estimating the edge frequencies. The proposed method is compared with existing energy detector methods for complexity and performance. It is shown that, for a fixed number of input samples, error decreases with time in the proposed algorithm as compared to other methods where error is constant. Design examples and simulations show that the complexity of the proposed method is lower than the other methods for a given error in estimating the edge frequencies
On Credit-based Incentive Mechanisms of Voluntary User Comment Reviewing in Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

With the recent advance of micro-blogs and social networks, people can view and post comments on the websites in a very convenient way. However, it is also a big concern that the malicious users keep polluting the cyber environment by scamming, spamming or repeatedly advertising. So far the most common way to detect and report malicious comments is based on voluntary reviewing from honest users. To encourage contribution, very often some non-monetary credits will be given to an honest user who validly reports a malicious comment. In this note we argue that such credit-based incentive mechanisms should fail in most cases: if reporting a malicious comment receives diminishing revenue, then in the long term no rational honest user will participate in comment reviewing.
Lossy Asymptotic Equipartition property for Hierarchical Data Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a rate-distortion theory for hierarchical networked data structures modelled as tree-indexed multitype process. To be specific, this paper gives a generalized Asymptotic Equipartition Property (AEP) for the Process. The general methodology of proof of the AEP are process level large deviation principles for suitably defined empirical measures for muiltitype Galton-Watson trees.
Resilience of Locally Routed Network Flows: More Capacity is Not Always Better
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we are concerned with the resilience of locally routed network flows with finite link capacities. In this setting, an external inflow is injected to the so-called origin nodes. The total inflow arriving at each node is routed locally such that none of the outgoing links are overloaded unless the node receives an inflow greater than its total outgoing capacity. A link irreversibly fails if it is overloaded or if there is no operational link in its immediate downstream to carry its flow. For such systems, resilience is defined as the minimum amount of reduction in the link capacities that would result in the failure of all the outgoing links of an origin node. We show that such networks do not necessarily become more resilient as additional capacity is built in the network. Moreover, when the external inflow does not exceed the network capacity, selective reductions of capacity at certain links can actually help averting the cascading failures, without requiring any change in the local routing policies. This is an attractive feature as it is often easier in practice to reduce the available capacity of some critical links than to add physical capacity or to alter routing policies, e.g., when such policies are determined by social behavior, as in the case of road traffic networks. The results can thus be used for real-time monitoring of distance-to-failure in such networks and devising a feasible course of actions to avert systemic failures.
An Efficient Precoder Design for Multiuser MIMO Cognitive Radio Networks with Interference Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We consider a linear precoder design for an underlay cognitive radio multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channel, where the secondary system consisting of a secondary base-station (BS) and a group of secondary users (SUs) is allowed to share the same spectrum with the primary system. All the transceivers are equipped with multiple antennas, each of which has its own maximum power constraint. Assuming zero-forcing method to eliminate the multiuser interference, we study the sum rate maximization problem for the secondary system subject to both per-antenna power constraints at the secondary BS and the interference power constraints at the primary users. The problem of interest differs from the ones studied previously that often assumed a sum power constraint and/or single antenna employed at either both the primary and secondary receivers or the primary receivers. To develop an efficient numerical algorithm, we first invoke the rank relaxation method to transform the considered problem into a convex-concave problem based on a downlink-uplink result. We then propose a barrier interior-point method to solve the resulting saddle point problem. In particular, in each iteration of the proposed method we find the Newton step by solving a system of discrete-time Sylvester equations, which help reduce the complexity significantly, compared to the conventional method. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate fast convergence and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
An iterated local search algorithm for the minimum differential dispersion problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2016
Year: 2016

Given a set of $n$ elements separated by a pairwise distance matrix, the minimum differential dispersion problem (Min-Diff DP) aims to identify a subset of m elements (m < n) such that the difference between the maximum sum and the minimum sum of the inter-element distances between any two chosen elements is minimized. We propose an effective iterated local search (denoted by ILS_MinDiff) for Min-Diff DP. To ensure an effective exploration and exploitation of the search space, the proposed ILS_MinDiff algorithm iterates through three sequential search phases: a fast descent-based neighborhood search phase to find a local optimum from a given starting solution, a local optima exploring phase to visit nearby high-quality solutions around a given local optimum, and a local optima escaping phase to move away from the current search region. Experimental results on six data sets of 190 benchmark instances demonstrate that ILS_MinDiff competes favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms by finding 130 improved best results (new upper bounds).
Nonuniform probability modulation for reducing energy consumption of remote sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

One of the main goals of 5G wireless telecommunication technology is improving energy efficiency, especially of remote sensors which should be able for example to transmit on average 1bit/s for 10 years from a single AAA battery. There will be discussed using modulation with nonuniform probability distribution of symbols for improving energy efficiency of transmission at cost of reduced throughput. While the zero-signal (silence) has zero energy cost to emit, it can carry information if used alongside other symbols. If used more frequently than others, for example for majority of time slots or OFDM subcarriers, the number of bits transmitted per energy unit can be significantly increased. For example for hexagonal modulation and zero noise, this amount of bits per energy unit can be doubled by reducing throughput 2.7 times, thanks to using the zero-signal with probability $\approx$ 0.84. There will be discussed models and methods for such nonuniform probability modulations (NPM).
Infill Optimization for Additive Manufacturing -- Approaching Bone-like Porous Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2016
Year: 2016

Porous structures such as trabecular bone are widely seen in nature. These structures exhibit superior mechanical properties whilst being lightweight. In this paper, we present a method to generate bone-like porous structures as lightweight infill for additive manufacturing. Our method builds upon and extends voxel-wise topology optimization. In particular, for the purpose of generating sparse yet stable structures distributed in the interior of a given shape, we propose upper bounds on the localized material volume in the proximity of each voxel in the design domain. We then aggregate the local per-voxel constraints by their p-norm into an equivalent global constraint, in order to facilitate an efficient optimization process. Implemented on a high-resolution topology optimization framework, our results demonstrate mechanically optimized, detailed porous structures which mimic those found in nature. We further show variants of the optimized structures subject to different design specifications, and analyze the optimality and robustness of the obtained structures.
Experience: Type alignment on DBpedia and Freebase
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Linked Open Data exhibits growth in both volume and variety of published data. Due to this variety, instances of many different types (e.g. Person) can be found in published datasets. Type alignment is the problem of automatically matching types (in a possibly many-many fashion) between two such datasets. Type alignment is an important preprocessing step in instance matching. Instance matching concerns identifying pairs of instances referring to the same underlying entity. By performing type alignment a priori, only instances conforming to aligned types are processed together, leading to significant savings. This article describes a type alignment experience with two large-scale cross-domain RDF knowledge graphs, DBpedia and Freebase, that contain hundreds, or even thousands, of unique types. Specifically, we present a MapReduce-based type alignment algorithm and show that there are at least three reasonable ways of evaluating type alignment within the larger context of instance matching. We comment on the consistency of those results, and note some general observations for researchers evaluating similar algorithms on cross-domain graphs.
A Novel Implementation for Automated Health Monitoring System
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

The main concept of the proposed work is derived from Wireless Body Area network (WBAN). The proposed work employs Raspberry Pi kit as a personal server which logs the health data and it can be accessed by any PDA within the LAN range. In this paper, two vital parameters namely Temperature sensor and Heart beat sensor have been considered.
Unconstrained Two-parallel-plane Model for Focused Plenoptic Cameras Calibration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

The plenoptic camera can capture both angular and spatial information of the rays, enabling 3D reconstruction by single exposure. The geometry of the recovered scene structure is affected by the calibration of the plenoptic camera significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel unconstrained two-parallel-plane (TPP) model with 7 parameters to describe a 4D light field. By reconstructing scene points from ray-ray association, a 3D projective transformation is deduced to establish the relationship between the scene structure and the TPP parameters. Based on the transformation, we simplify the focused plenoptic camera as a TPP model and calibrate its intrinsic parameters. Our calibration method includes a close-form solution and a nonlinear optimization by minimizing re-projection error. Experiments on both simulated data and real scene data verify the performance of the calibration on the focused plenoptic camera.
Time-Asynchronous Robust Cooperative Transmission for the Downlink of C-RAN
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This work studies the robust design of downlink precoding for cloud radio access network (C-RAN) in the presence of asynchronism among remote radio heads (RRHs). Specifically, a C-RAN downlink system is considered in which non-ideal fronthaul links connecting two RRHs to a Baseband Unit (BBU) may cause a time offset, as well as a phase offset, between the transmissions of the two RRHs. The offsets are a priori not known to the BBU. With the aim of counteracting the unknown time offset, a robust precoding scheme is considered that is based on the idea of correlating the signal transmitted by one RRH with a number of delayed versions of the signal transmitted by the other RRH. For this transmission strategy, the problem of maximizing the worst-case minimum rate is tackled while satisfying per-RRH transmit power constraints. Numerical results are reported that verify the advantages of the proposed robust scheme as compared to conventional non-robust design criteria as well as non-cooperative transmission.
Optimization of Bootstrapping in Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

In 2009, Gentry proposed the first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, an extremely powerful cryptographic primitive that enables to perform computations, i.e., to evaluate circuits, on encrypted data without decrypting them first. This has many applications, in particular in cloud computing. In all currently known FHE schemes, encryptions are associated to some (non-negative integer) noise level, and at each evaluation of an AND gate, the noise level increases. This is problematic because decryption can only work if the noise level stays below some maximum level $L$ at every gate of the circuit. To ensure that property, it is possible to perform an operation called \emph{bootstrapping} to reduce the noise level. However, bootstrapping is time-consuming and has been identified as a critical operation. This motivates a new problem in discrete optimization, that of choosing where in the circuit to perform bootstrapping operations so as to control the noise level; the goal is to minimize the number of bootstrappings in circuits. In this paper, we formally define the \emph{bootstrap problem}, we design a polynomial-time $L$-approximation algorithm using a novel method of rounding of a linear program, and we show a matching hardness result: $(L-ε)$-inapproximability for any $ε>0$.
SALVE: Server Authentication with Location VErification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

The Location Service (LCS) proposed by the telecommunication industry is an architecture that allows the location of mobile devices to be accessed in various applications. We explore the use of LCS in location-enhanced server authentication, which traditionally relies on certificates. Given recent incidents involving certificate authorities, various techniques to strengthen server authentication were proposed. They focus on improving the certificate validation process, such as pinning, revocation, or multi-path probing. In this paper, we propose using the server's geographic location as a second factor of its authenticity. Our solution, SALVE, achieves location-based server authentication by using secure DNS resolution and by leveraging LCS for location measurements. We develop a TLS extension that enables the client to verify the server's location in addition to its certificate. Successful server authentication therefore requires a valid certificate and the server's presence at a legitimate geographic location, e.g., on the premises of a data center. SALVE prevents server impersonation by remote adversaries with mis-issued certificates or stolen private keys of the legitimate server. We develop a prototype implementation and our evaluation in real-world settings shows that it incurs minimal impact to the average server throughput. Our solution is backward compatible and can be integrated with existing approaches for improving server authentication in TLS.